Rachel Farlow

STOCKROOM

Natures stride overriding, ephemeral memories, a final goodbye of hurling light. A pain at night, a wither of hope and prosperity. Bright peonies, lilies that made you sneeze, an allergy that won’t leave. Days move fast, nightfall floods the house, waiting for an answer. A complete blackout appears momentarily, blue hydrangeas blooming from the garden stay still, an effervescent flutter of pigment and light, a polarising stain. Gardens continue to grow, a bulb takes shape. Echoes of memories begin to fade. A capricious hum, back and forth. Clarity and resolution, there’s no resolution to somebody’s absence.

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‘Walk of life, night sweat’ translates as brief observations during the time of grief after the loss of a loved one. Still life is used as a symbolic connotation of nature and its fleeting cycles. Time and fragility lend itself as embodiments of ephemeral experiences associated with memory, a silent drama of the human experience. Murky undertones are coupled with pops of colour that toil with form and shape carried by indications of night and day, the grappling of time slipping away. In these paintings, improvisations give as a sense of vulnerability, arriving at place where mark-making acts as a memory trace. Sweeping dashes and strokes of paint across the substrates relieve the tension of the imagery transforming the negative and the positive spaces that gesture between abstraction and figuration. A constant state of becoming is sort after, holding onto something strong and then letting go. `

A nod to art history includes inspiration from a rounded mix of artists such as Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, Raoul De Keyser, Howard Hodgkin, Nicolas de Stael, Lois Dodd and Theodore Scott - Dabo.